MPs warn that patients are being left unable to make choices about where they
are treated because some hospitals are deliberately screwing waiting list
data

Some hospital trusts are deliberately scewing waiting list times to help meet targets in acts of "blatant fraud", MPs have said.

The Commons' Public Accounts Committee warned that public confidence in waiting times is being "undermined" by hospitals which record false figures.

Spot checks carried out by the National Audit Office showed that more than half of cases hospital trusts were either wrongly recording data about waiting lists or keeping incomplete records.

The committee also warned that on "rare occasions" acts of "blatant fraud" may be taking place.

Police are currently investigating allegations that cancer waiting times were deliberately falsified at Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust, where staff said they were “bullied or pressured” into altering the data.

The MPs said that the failure to record waiting times properly is stopping patients from being able to make informed choices on where they are treated.

They also found that hospital trusts are failing to impose financial penalties when targets are missed to help "drive up standards".

Margaret Hodge, the chairman of the committee, said: "Public confidence in the success hospital trusts have had in meeting the 18 week waiting time target is inevitably undermined by errors in trusts’ recording of waiting time information.

“If patients cannot be confident of accurate comparable data on the performance of hospitals they cannot exercise choice. Both GPs and their patients need reliable and comparable information about the waiting time performance of individual trusts so that they can make an informed choice about where to be treated."

Labour introduced NHS targets in 2008 which state that 90 per cent of hospital patients who need in-patient care and 95 per cent of those needing outpatient treatment should wait no longer than 18 weeks.